


Trash Day

by skuldchan



Series: 極神主夫譜：The Divine Art of the Househusband [2]
Category: HIStory3 - 圈套 | HIStory3: Trapped
Genre: Domesticity, Fluff and Humor, Jack the Mercenary Househusband, M/M, Mercenary Househusband Problem-Solving Hijinks, Podfic Available, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2019-08-10
Packaged: 2020-08-11 13:50:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20154643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuldchan/pseuds/skuldchan
Summary: An unexpected encounter with someone from his old life throws off all of Jack’s plans, the most important of which is taking out the trash.





	Trash Day

“For fuck’s sake, not now,” Jack hissed under his breath as the Vespa behind him revealed itself by flashing its lights and blaring its sirens. 

He wasn't violating any traffic laws or transporting any contraband—he was just on his way home from the supermarket, for crying out loud—so this must be a stop of a different kind. 

For a moment, Jack entertained the thought of shifting his bike into high gear and leading the officer on a merry chase out of the suburbs and through the center of the city, but he decided against it. Even if he managed to lose his pursuer, the authorities would just pick another day to tail him again. 

Jack sighed. It was better to put a stop to this once and for all, even though it would take time. He glanced at his watch. Time he didn’t have today.

Resigned, he down-shifted and slowed, pulling over to the side of the quiet residential street with the police scooter close behind. Jack put his foot down to steady himself on his motorcycle, leaving it idling at low revs, on the off chance he needed to make a quick getaway. 

Behind him, the police officer cut the engine, dismounted, and approached. “License and registration, please,” said a muffled voice through a black helmet and tinted visor. 

Jack smirked, recognizing the figure. “Get to the point, Nick, I know it’s you.”

The officer’s shoulders slumped slightly. “Really? How can you tell?”

“Helmet, posture, the way you’ve been following me since I left the store,” Jack replied. 

Nick pulled off his helmet, his cheeks flushed red as his face emerged from the stuffy padded interior and into the sweltering Taipei summer heat. Nick had been Jack’s handler at Interpol for the past five years, acting oftentimes as his sole contact over the grueling duration of his deep cover missions. Though they were neither friends nor colleagues, Jack had a certain nostalgic fondness for Nick that had made him decide to pull over when he did. 

Jack had announced his retirement abruptly by returning Interpol’s advance on the Cambodian mission and sending along the contact details of a Vietnamese guy he knew who had been able to fill in on short notice. He had expected that to be that, but in the past few weeks he had spotted Nick staking him out in various disguises—convenience store clerk, gardener, DHL delivery boy. Traffic cop was a new one that Jack hadn’t expected—a little too on the nose, that.

“What do you want?”

As he tucked his helmet under his arm, Nick paused for a moment, steeling himself against an answer he already knew was coming. “The Chief wants you back,” he blurted finally, perhaps more loudly than intended. 

Jack smiled disarmingly. “No can do, I’m retired now.”

“Seriously? You’re actually settling for being a househusband?"

“Well, house-boyfriend, technically speaking,” said Jack. “But I have the feeling we’re headed in the direction of long-term commitment.”

“Um…” Nick paused, confusion written all over his features. “...Congratulations?”

“Thank you. It feels surprisingly good, you know.”

“But all you do is housework all day.”

“It’s more rewarding than you’d think.”

Nick regarded him skeptically. “And you’re not getting paid by anybody?”

“Not everything is about money,” intoned Jack sagely.

“I mean, by another agency or something.” Nick pursed his lips. “MI-6? The CIA?”

Jack chuckled with amusement. “And what would the CIA want with my Zhao Li An?”

Nick thought for a few seconds. “Good point,” he concluded.

Jack glanced again at his watch. “Well, I better—” 

“So you’re sure you’re not working for any other intelligence agency?”

“I’m retired,” Jack repeated, his grin disappearing. “Can I go now?”

“No,” said Nick, though he hesitated as he said it, as if wondering how he might enforce that response, especially against someone as formidable as Jack.

“Why not?” Jack asked, his voice suddenly quiet and firm. He tensed despite the relaxed hunch of his shoulders. The switchblade he always carried in the pocket of his leather jacket grew heavier.

“Um, because the Chief told me that I have to convince you to come back. That Vietnamese guy just isn’t cutting it. They sent him back with his kneecaps shattered.”

Jack grimaced. That sounded painful.

“Yeah.” Nick wrinkled his nose. “It’s going to take him a while to recover.” He heaved a sigh. “Look, I kind of put ‘convince Jack to go to Cambodia again’ as a goal on my personal development plan this year, so if you don’t agree to come out of retirement, it’ll reflect badly on my performance review. Come on, help a brother out. Please?” 

Jack relaxed again, his usual sly smile returning. “That sounds like a Nick problem, and not a Jack problem.”

“I know,” Nick admitted quietly.

Jack extended his arm and leaned forward a little to pat his old handler on the shoulder. “You should know better than to put something you can’t control on your development plan.” 

“I know,” Nick whispered, reality finally sinking in. 

Jack let him have exactly three more seconds of silence, before he turned away and revved up his engine. 

“Where are you going?” Nick asked.

“Home,” Jack replied. “It’s trash day.”

“But every other day is trash day,” Nick protested.

“I know, but it’s really piling up, and my pickup’s in ten minutes.” Jack waved at the bewildered figure growing smaller in his mirrors as he pulled his motorcycle back into traffic.

* * *

Jack’s heart sunk to the strident blare of _Für Elise_, mangled by the tinny speakers of the garbage truck as it pulled away from his street corner. 

_Shit, shit, shit!_

He hopped off his bike before it had even stopped and dashed madly toward the house, fumbling for his keys. Agonizing seconds passed before the lock turned, before he threw open the door and dove for the trash bag that he had left in the entryway.

“Fuck!” he howled internally as the garbled, high-pitched strains of Beethoven’s masterpiece began to recede into the distance. 

Silently, he cursed Nick’s poor timing for making him miss the final trash pickup slot in his area that weekend. If he missed this one, the truck wasn’t scheduled to come back until Monday afternoon. Jack gritted his teeth, determined that his waste wasn’t going to sit around and fester another day.

When he looked back upon this moment later in the day, Jack would come to the conclusion that the sensible thing to do would have been to pull out his phone and check the pickup schedule for the neighboring districts. Surely somewhere in the city, there would have been a time and place he could have made. But that was not the decision that Jack ended up making, because the dinner he had promised Zhao Zi would need to stew for a few hours, and because Jack was not the type of person to do something later when he could do it right the fuck now.

So Jack hefted the giant, electric-blue 50-liter bag over his shoulder, leapt back on his motorcycle and sped off, hot on the tail of the retreating yellow truck. It had turned a corner and vanished from view, but its cartoonishly garish tune betrayed its position. 

Jack put on a burst of speed, the roar of his exhaust echoing off the houses lining the sleepy residential avenue. His tires squealed as he took the corner at high speed, pitching low as he approached the apex, his sack of garbage rolling off his back, almost scraping its bottom open along the asphalt. 

With a twitch of his shoulder, Jack righted himself, the motion yanking his trash away from danger. 

The song of the truck grew louder, and Jack spotted it not a few hundred meters on. Its modest speed was no match for his modded motorcycle, and within a few seconds of shifting into a higher gear, he had caught up. 

Jack smelled victory and refuse.

All he had to do was follow it to its next stop, and that was trash disposal ticked off of his to-do list.

He passed a street, and then another. 

This truck had fewer stops than usual, Jack thought. 

He passed yet another street, and then two more after without even a hint of slowing down before he realized that the garbage truck wasn’t stopping, that it looked kind of full, and that it was probably going all the way back to the depot while his rubbish, still undisposed of, was slung on his back.

How far was the waste depot anyway, Jack wondered, but didn’t want to stay to find out. He hadn’t had the time to unload his saddlebags; his groceries were still in there!

It was then that he spotted it, and it seemed for a moment as if the clouds had parted and his ancestors in the heavens smiled kindly upon him. In the sloping bed at the back of the truck, there was a tantalizing empty space between two other blue garbage bags. It would be a tight squeeze, but the geometry of the pile meant that his trash, if it landed correctly, might just be the right fit. 

Loathe to ride all the back to central waste management with his dinner and back again, he sidled up to the rear of the truck and matched its speed. Bracing his legs against his bike and his sanity against the crescendo of the first eight bars of _Für Elise_ on endless repeat, he shrugged the rubbish off his shoulder and hurled the bag forward, bottom first. 

It rose in the air in a stunted parabolic arc, blue plastic fluttering in the light breeze as it flew. Jack held his breath, partly from anticipation, but mostly from the stench. Then the garbage truck put on a sudden burst of acceleration, just as his trash had sailed past the peak of its trajectory and started its descent. 

His refuse still landed in the truck, but its increasing speed meant that instead of docking perfectly, ensconced between two bags, Jack's trash hit a particularly puffy, air-filled bag and rebounded.

There was a crinkling sound and then a hollow thud as the garbage sack tumbled to the ground, scattering fifty liters of paper towels, plastic wrappers, old socks, and sundry detritus all over the asphalt. Jack had to brake suddenly to avoid hitting his own refuse—particularly the pieces of those two ceramic mugs he had accidentally knocked off the kitchen counter the other day. 

The lights on the garbage truck flashed red, and it came to an abrupt halt.

“Hey!” the driver shouted, getting out and slamming the truck door behind him. “What the hell are you doing?”

There were two cardinal rules if you fucked something up in the mercenary business, particularly the part that involved going deep undercover for months at a time while infiltrating an organized crime syndicate. The first rule was 'leave no witnesses'. And the second rule, if the first was a no-go, was 'run'.

So Jack spun his motorcycle around and wheeled away, leaving Ludwig van Beethoven and the trash guy behind him, still shouting, "Hey, you! Hey!" 

But there was no use crying over spilt garbage, as the old saying went.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks again to [Naye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/naye) and [Xparrot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xparrot) for their beta and enablement. They are two of the most amazing writers in the Guardian fandom. Check out their work if you haven't already!
> 
> I thought of this premise when [Naye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/naye) informed me that Taiwan [has an unusual waste management system](https://www.buzzworthy.com/taiwan-garbage-disposal/) wherein a truck comes around designated spots at a designated time in town five days a week, and people will drop off their trash and recyclables. They will literally wait on a street corner at the trash pick-up time, and then throw their garbage in the truck. This means trash doesn't sit around festering for a whole week in a dumpster like it does in the rest of the world. 
> 
> Also, unlike the western world, the trash trucks play a merry ice cream truck-like tune as they go around. The two songs of choice are apparently Beethoven's ["Für Elise"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7DPXpqp9e4) and the Polish piece ["A Maiden's Prayer"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQ1NfjPauw) by Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska. 
> 
> I wonder what Beethoven would think of his composition being thought of as "the trash song."

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Trash Day](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21372529) by [SkuldReads (skuldchan)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuldchan/pseuds/SkuldReads)


End file.
